How to start using SEO techniques on a website?

you already know what is SEO, okay. But how do I start applying these SEO techniques to my site?

It’s a common question I face in my daily life. A number of clients are asking how it works in practice and what can be done internally to accelerate results. Well, if it were easy, there would not be so many startups and e-commerce investing ever more in Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing, two methodologies based on SEO.

And there are some details that must be observed in order for the results to be achieved on time and without further increasing costs. If you are willing to do the optimization of your website, this is a complete guide with everything you need to do to assemble a complete list of actions.

Since I want to be practical, I will not dwell on it any longer. Let’s get right to the point. To the points, by the way. In this article, I’ll cite the best On-page and Off-page SEO strategies and strategies to get you started.

I did it very carefully and based on the most common audience questions.

I hope you like it, really!

SEO On-page techniques

SEO On-page is all that can be done internally to optimize your website.

You must be aware of many things to not let anything pass. So in this content, I will go straight to the point, citing all the factors you should by in your checklist to have a fully optimized SEO site.

1. Keyword Research

Rank in keywords important to your personas is the first step of SEO planning. It is at this point that you delimit your audience and make their content to be found only by those who can potentially reach the other end of the shopping journey. That is possible consumers of your company.

But how to do this keyword research in practice? I’ll explain!

First, you will need a good search tool. A reminder: probably, if you have ambitious plans, you will have to invest in a paid tool. Being honest, if you do a competent job, it is an investment that will pay off in less than a year.

In addition to words, as a worthy SEO tool, the Adwords keyword researcher also indicates the term competition to rank well, the average monthly search volume and the cost-per-click (CPC) for creating ads.

In the vast majority of cases, Keyword Planner will break your branch.

However, if you do not have a keyword idea to start with, you’ll need other tools.

This tool makes a complete x-ray of your site. The great advantage, for those who do not have a starting point, is to know for which keywords the visitors come to your page.

It gives you a complete list, the words that bring the most traffic to the terms that bring less.

Obviously, you should reinforce your focus on positioning yourself even better in terms that bring you more visitors. Take advantage of these terms in Adwords and see their potential: if a word that has 1000 searches per month currently brings you 100 hits, your first effort should be to improve your position in it, so you can get up to 300 hits, for example.

These two tools should suffice for an initial listing of keywords.

But to refine the work and broaden its horizons, there is no way to give up tools like SemRush and Moz. Their differential is to provide full data on the keywords used by direct competitors and to indicate all possible data on those terms.

The difficulty of indexing, search volume, CPC, competition, the positioning of your site in the keyword, the positioning of competitors, etc. That is, the least you have to do to build a list of keywords to work on the content of your site is to index in all the terms that your competitors are.

Of course, you do not need to focus at all at the same time. Fortunately, by pointing to the URL of the competing site, you can find the words that most bring traffic to the site. Prioritize them at the beginning of your SEO planning and then expand your reach. It is always important to remember that person planning is key here.

It has happened to me to worry so much about ranking in the same words of the competitor, that I ended up falling into the same error of them. Sometimes the public searches for something totally different on Google, and neither I nor they could reach those people.

So do not follow your competitors blindly. Copy your hits and find out your flaws, to make them an advantage of your business.

Do keyword research that competitors are well indexed, yes. But then do yours!

2. Create optimized content

Now that you already have the list of keywords, time to go to the content. That means: producing new ones and optimizing the ones you already have.

How to produce optimized content in SEO? Being relevant to the public and Google. The best way to get a good position is to produce better content than your competitors. More informative. More well written. More optimized.

A few years ago, it was easier to “push the bar” to get first place in the search result. Repeating “thousand” times the keyword in the content was one of the tricks that formed the “black hat SEO”.

However, in order to refine its research and provide more quality to users, the world’s largest search engine has sought to sophisticate its robots. There are a number of factors that are taken into account in addition to the use of the keywords.

Let’s quote the main ones.

Create content with more than 700 words

Currently, the first results for the searches are contents with between 700 and 1000 words. It’s a form of Google’s robots to find out if the text goes deeper into the subject.

So, do you know the strategy you’ve probably heard of, producing a bunch of small, short texts using as many keywords as possible?

Still, works. In the short term. In the long run, you can say goodbye to your indexing attempts. But can you argue? So just use a character generator for long texts and you’re done? No!

The fact that the text is long allows you to use other headlines – captions – throughout the text and terms referring to the subject. It’s just these specific terms that tell Google what that content is about.

The longer and well written, probably the greater the variety of related words used throughout the text, right? That is where these materials differ. The Google rating system identifies these terms. You get points from that.

If your content is good, people will probably spend more time on your page, commenting, and share your stuff.

It is the union of these two factors – optimization for Google and quality for the public – that will make your content achieve a good position, along with the other topics that we will cover next.

4.Title tags

Title tags indicate what your content is about. It is this hierarchy that Google’s robots read the texts of the site.

That’s why it’s critical that H1 contain the keyword. Likewise, the headlines (H2, H3, H4, H5, etc.) should be several and include the main related terms.

So Google realizes what the text is about and the depth of it.

5. Alt text for images

The alt text is nothing more than the text that will appear if the image does not load. If for the reader what matters is the image, for Google the only way to read it is through the alt text.

That’s why it’s also critical that at least one of the content images contain the keyword. However, the others should be as descriptive as possible.

Example: a blog post on “Healthy Eating Tips”. The alt text of the cover image can be “list of healthy eating tips”. However, if the rest are photos of tomatoes, greens, healthy and organic foods, you should ideally use these words in the description.

So Google will also know that they are related terms and their content will gain credibility.

6. Meta description

The meta description is that text that appears below the content title in the search results. It is critical that your meta description is “seller”. It’s your chance to win over the reader. The tip is to get right to the point and deliver everything the content will comment on.

If you have no idea, again, turn to the competition. See the meta descriptions of the first ones, offer everything they say to the reader and something more. And do not forget to enter your keyword every time!

7. Permalink Structure

The page and post URL should also contain the keyword. It’s essential.

It does not have to be very long, with the entire title of the blog post. Simplify and use only the keyword when possible.

8. Responsive design

Well, more than half of the accesses to the internet are made by smartphones. Therefore, more and more Google considers the performance of sites on these devices to check if they are reliable.

Google Webmaster Tools, which I’ve already commented on here, also takes an x-ray of the responsive performance of your site. It indicates the errors so that you can correct them. Make sure your site is mobile friendly.

9. PageSpeed

The page load time is also a factor considered by Google to evaluate the quality of the site.

Use the free Website Grader analysis tool to check if your portal page speed is acceptable and what improvements can be made. You just need to put the URL of your page and fill out a very short form.

The analysis is quite complete, although some features for immediate improvement are only possible with the paid version. However, you can do this with your development team without problems.

Heavy images and over-coding are the most common reasons for slow page entry, which pushes many, many even visitors.

10. Security Certificates

Recently Google also started to value sites with SSL or HTTPS certificates.

They are guarantees that they give a certain work to achieve – they are paid also, but very well-seen by the platform. In a week you can implement this new URL, which also brings more security to its users, especially in the case of e-commerces.

It is much easier to implement the security certificate on sites that are still being built since the number of URLs is quite small. Great sites also do not face much problem, so do not worry. One only has to ensure that automatic redirection is done correctly on all existing pages.

Off-page SEO techniques

Now that you’ve improved the internal pages of your site, it’s time to bring relevancy from external links. This is the hallmark of a good SEO strategy and the fastest way to make your site market benchmark.

Understand how!

1. Gain confidence from Google

Google PageRank takes into account aspects not directly related to the content of your page.

This is the case of the Domain Authority and the Page Authority. The domain authority is the measure that tells you how relevant your site is. The more well-indexed content and the more external content that links to your site, the higher your domain authority.

The page authority refers only to a specific page. If you index a content first for an important keyword, more external links will be directed to that page, which in turn will increase the page authority.

But it’s not just about backlinks.

The authority is also linked to the time of existence of the page. Yes, Google takes into account the age of your business in the digital territory, even if it is not so relevant.

The very prime factor is the rejection rate.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is calculated on a number of times a user entered your site on a particular page and left without interacting. This means: You have not clicked any links, nor opened any other content.

Google understands that there was nothing more interesting and that your site did not solve the problem of this user, taking your points. Sometimes, as I said earlier, the loading time and problems in HTML are also responsible for this kind of visitor drop out.

The bounce rate is reported in Google Analytics. So, always take a look at this metric on your most-accessed pages to make sure nothing’s wrong is happening.

2. Backlinks and link building

Link building is the crucial part of SEO strategy. No matter how well your content is and are well ranked, there is huge potential for traffic that can be achieved through content planned in partnership.

Think you offer a service to an audience A. This audience A, in addition to its services, may also look for other types of products to solve other problems. Why not also appear on relevant pages of these other products that he may be looking for and come up with a solution that persona has not yet awakened?

That’s what a well-thought backlink strategy is all about. Be where your audience is and draw them to your page in partnership with really relevant sites.

How to find these sites?

The idea is to assemble a list with all the links that may be useful to your business. Eventually, you will not be able to partner with everyone. That is why it is important to have a range of alternatives.

You can use it for free to test your possibilities. I bet you’ll want to pay later.

The factors you should take into account are:

3. Quality of links

Use Ahrefs to find the most relevant pages for the public and Google on the subjects that interest you. The next step is to find more frequent authors and try to get in touch. Send an email and suggest a frequent guest exchange, perhaps one per month.

Show that you both have to win, after all if you have a good website, the guest will also have an increase in relevance. Take advantage of leaving comments on the most visited pages of partners, with links to your site as well. It’s an old strategy, but it still works well!

The material produced must be super shareable. You and the guest should disclose it as a priority. So the scope becomes even larger, for the two involved.

4. Anchor text

The anchor text is nothing more than the words used as a hyperlink. Never link to “see more here” or “this page”.

Ideally, you should use related terms, keyword synonyms, or the specific keyword of the content you are linking to.

4. Number of links

Obviously, the more sites you refer to – link to your content – the more likely your texts are to potential users.

This has a huge weight for search engines.

It is their main way of knowing that their content is the greatest digital reference on that subject or keyword.

Extra Tips for SEO techniques

Well, you read the material to the end.

I hope it really was helpful.

To help you further, I will reinforce the tools you can use to build your strategy:

Keyword Planner

SemRush

Moz

Google Search Console

Website Grader

Ahrefs

WordPress (with plugin Yoast or All-In-One SEO).

I wanted to quote WordPress as the last tip. Do you know all these tips I gave about formatting, tags, title, meta description and alt text? So some templates – including free ones – from CMS to use for creating websites in the world, condense this information into fields to fill.

All this using one of the plugins I quoted: Yoast or All-In-One SEO.

In addition, WordPress templates are designed to be optimized and perform better according to the standards charged by Google. Therefore, I strongly recommend that you use WordPress as your site’s platform, including resorting to a migration.

This is personal, it was my last tip in this article. Now you are ready to put your hand in the dough.

Any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. We are experts in SEO strategies and we have no problem sharing our knowledge.